[Novalug] VDQ : what to do with an old P2

Ed T. Toton III bones@necrobones.net
Wed Jan 10 14:06:24 EST 2007


Thus spake Kevin Kitts:

> I happen to have a wired 100 mbps ethernet in my house. What amazes me 
> is that this old PII/266 will sustain 7.5 MBytes/second on file 
> transfers. Honestly, I don't think a faster computer would do any better 
> job as a file server. I'm running SUSE with Samba as the server but any 
> Linux distro would likely do.


Yeah, I've found that these old machines are quite viable as household 
servers. Most newer hardware is overkill for what you will usually ask it 
to do. For quite some time, my primary server at home was a P2 machine 
(eventually upgraded it to dual P2 450, before more recently overkilling 
it with an Opteron).

A file server is a good idea. A very useful option is to also use it as a 
local DNS resolver/cache (practically works out of the box with most 
distros, and it makes a subtle but noticeable difference when surfing), 
maybe a DHCP server if your router doesn't do that, and perhaps even a 
local mail server.

For the latter, that was more useful before we all went broadband, but 
several years ago I got tired of my ISP and webhost's mail servers being 
bogged down. With fetchmail running out of cron, you can pull your mail 
down onto your linux box, and have your client interact with it from there 
across the LAN. This makes the interactive portion snappy and responsive, 
even if new mail takes a couple extra minutes to become available. 
Obviously this is superfluous if you use gmail or hotmail or some other 
remote web mail system. (in my case, I've managed my own mail for years, 
running both a local mail server, and one on a VPS host remotely)

P2 machines are quite sufficient for all of these things at home.


Some good suggestions about distros have been made in this thread already, 
but I'd like to add CentOS to the list too. It's de-branded Red Hat 
(specifically RHEL). Slackware is a great choice if you want a no-frills 
distro to learn more serious non-distro-specific unix/linux (I use slack 
on my primary server). But you'd save yourself some headaches by going to 
something robust like CentOS or Debian if you want good package management 
and easier setup of your services.




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